


Scream of Wheat

by reena_jenkins, somnolentblue



Category: The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
Genre: Audio Format: MP3, Audio Format: Streaming, Community: pt-lightning, Cooking, Crack, F/M, PT-Lightning Challenge: Round 1, Podfic & Podficced Works, Podfic Length: 10-20 Minutes, Sound Effects, Zombie Gingerbread Men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-30
Updated: 2013-11-30
Packaged: 2018-01-02 00:38:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1050460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reena_jenkins/pseuds/reena_jenkins, https://archiveofourown.org/users/somnolentblue/pseuds/somnolentblue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jewel Finkelstein is a master alchemist, an awe-inspiring transmogrifier, a tremendous revivifier. This is not her fault.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Scream of Wheat

**Author's Note:**

> A [pod together lightning](http://pt-lightning.dreamwidth.org) project. Podfic by [reena_jenkins](http://reena-jenkins.livejournal.com) and text by [somnolentblue](http://somnolentblue.dreamwidth.org).
> 
> Author's notes: I'd like to thank reena for being a fabulous partner as our project took shape and changed (rather a lot) and for bringing Jewel to life.
> 
> Reader's notes: This was awesome like whoa to work on, and I can't thank somnolentb enough for giving me such a fun playground. A full list of SFX credits for the podfic can be found [over here.](http://reena-jenkins.livejournal.com/134470.html)

 

 

 

Download this podfic as an mp3 **[over here (00:14:47, 14MB)](http://reena.parakaproductions.com/podfics/\(NBC\)%20_Scream%20of%20Wheat_.mp3)**

 

 

 

Jewel Finkelstein is a master alchemist, an awe-inspiring transmogrifier, a tremendous revivifier. This is not her fault.

It started with an advertisement. Lock, Shock, and Barrel excelled at adding to the quotidian annoyances of Halloween Town life, and lately they'd started dumping circulars, flyers, and barbershop advertisements into the assorted mail slots, boxes, and urns of residents. Jewel'd taken to sorting them into piles (Igor's bedding, colorful exothermic ink reactions, and creature stuffing) while her mind tumbled through her current experiments.

She was humming along to her other-half's calls for her presence—"Let me see our brain, my Jewel! Oh how it grows, my Jewel! The papers we can write, my Jewel! Where are you, my Jewel!"—when one of them caught her eye. Was that bleeding ink kermes or cocchineal? "Beguile the senses! Ensnare the mind! Enchant the soul!" it proclaimed. "My Jewel, my Jewel!" her Dear continued, and she flipped it over. "Borgia Cookery Correspondence Classes! Learn to concoct our memorable recipes in the comfort of your own kitchen!"

Hmmm. Her Dear needed something to fill his hours that wasn't watching her brain grow. (She didn't monitor his because he was the better anatomist, and she might do something irrevocable if she had to listen to one more ramble about how her sketches were insufficient and was that a smudge or a growth or an extrusion and could she be more gentle while her fingers were in his lobes.) Also, she'd gotten most of the chymistry skills and he was being recalcitrant about acknowledging that he needed to refine his current abilities in slicing, dicing, and titrating. This could work quite well, she mused as she filled out the subscription form. "Coming, my Dear!" she called as she dropped it into Igor's delivery pile.

Jewel Finkelstein possesses superb insight, and she modestly acknowledges that enrolling her other-half into the Borgia Cookery Extension School was brilliant. His steak tartare moos and his pufferfish induces the most exquisite paralysis. It had taken him a week to produce ginger snaps that cracked and crunched like bones and a mere two months to bring out the most delicate cyanide in the wild almond biscotti. His glee over macerating makes her smile, and she's located the perfect mace to give him as an anniversary token.

However, he can't resist experimenting.

Jewel surveyed the lab bench and frowned. The detritus of her Dear’s latest foray was cluttering her side of the workspace, surrounded by a sticky residue. A small lick revealed citrus with hints of cinnamon and ginger, which was unsettling. None of the Borgia recipes called for that particular combination, and after the grotesque marsh-mal-lows she distrusted her other-half’s intuition. However, his culinary forays were unlikely to unknot the fabric of reality, so she shoved everything to his side of the bench and then dropped her own equipment onto the space.

She tinkered, glassware clinking and shadows oozing around in their beakers and flasks. Soon, soon she would solve the secret of the Clown's gone-without-a-trace, learn its secrets and master them herself. Oppressive air roiled through the tower, and she hoped that the humidity made her lab coat stick to her outer shell wouldn't cause the umbra and penumbra to split precipitously. The solvents that dissolved the shadow-sherds from fabric reeked of roses and made Igor complain, but she wasn't going to go to Sally for a new lab coat, not after that girl's impertinent comments about her Dear.

Thunder cracked, and she shivered, enjoying the spark of lightning in the air and anticipating how it would invigorate her other-half. Was that his cackle in the distance? Was he creating another creature for their anniversary, perhaps the eldritch horror she'd requested? Was the thud-thud-thud reverberating through the stones the sound of a heart powered by infants' wails or the percussion of thrashing tentacles? Willing to let the mystery remain until he revealed the new creature, she turned back to her own work, only to place her stirring rod down when the thud-thud-thud became THUD-THUD-THUD and her glassware started vibrating.

This was unacceptable. She decanted the roiling shades from her flasks back into their holding jars. She didn't mutter as she climbed the stairs to her Dear's tower—she supported his creative impulses—but his animations and creatures interfering with her alchemy was against the terms of their agreements and, regardless of his intentions or their intended recipient, he must govern them better.

She paused on the threshold of his lab, arrested by the sight of a phalanx of gingerbread men marching around the vivification slab. They were disintegrating as they went, leaving crumbs and red smears in their wake. Igor was frantically frosting inert cookies on the slab, adding screaming mouths and shocked eyes, finishing the last one just as electricity crackled through the lab and arced through them. The newly animated cookies jumped up and joined their brethren's circles, and her Dear cackled. "My Jewel!" he exclaimed. "They're alive!"

She grabbed one, and it wiggled frantically in her grasp until she bit its head off. "Hmmm," she said, letting the flavors roll across her tongue. "Citrus?"

He grinned. "Blood orange. I'm still refining the hemoglobin balance, but that is a trifle."

She dropped a kiss on his head. "I have faith in you, my Dear," she said, "but I do need them to be a bit quieter. They're messing up my work."

"Anything for you, my Jewel," he said. "Igor! Catch them!"

She smiled fondly and went back down to her shadows, trusting that her other-half had the situation under control.

Really, this entire situation can be traced back to Jack, him and his wanderings through the Shadows of Holidays-That-Were to the Rituals-That-Are and bringing back ideas like Coffee Time and Birthday and _Election Day_. Jack Skellington is the uncontrolled variable in this equation, introducing Ideas without properly controlled conditions.

And Sally! That girl was no help, all of her doom and gloom and foresight and trickery just sitting silently by. Instead of counseling wisdom she encouraged 'experimentation' and 'democratic processes' and 'personal growth.' Halloween residents ooze from the interstices of shadow and nightmares. Personal growth is not applicable to their situation.

The doorbell screamed, and Jewel put a stopper in the flask. The doorbell shrieked, and she wrote 'death/glory' on the flask with the black wax pencil, overwriting the purple of its in-progress state. The doorbell wailed, and she traded her lab coat for the ermine, arming herself against whatever nonsense Shock was going to attempt to sell her this time.

"Yes?" she said as the door creaked open. Surprisingly, it was not Shock on the stoop. Instead, it was a kiss of vampires, wearing black ribbons that said FINKEL and STEIN on the dangling ends and brandishing clipboards and blood-ink pens. She wondered if she could appropriate one and reverse-engineer the anticoagulant. It would make a lovely surprise for her Dear.

"Hello," Elizabeth said, "we're here on behalf of the Sustenance-Necessary Alliance Promoting Exsanguination. Our members are gathering the required thirteen signatures prior to submitting our petition to Jack."

Jewel looked down her nose. "Ms. Bathory, the required thirteen signatures for what?" she asked.

"To add him to the ballot for Mayor!" Bram, the tiniest vampire, piped up. "He's so nice, and he doesn't care that we need to eat!"

Elizabeth sighed. "Blunt, perhaps, but not untrue. Dr. Finkelstein's latest outreach proved that he considers the needs of all of Halloween Town's citizens, not just the lowest echelons. The inclusiveness and generosity demonstrated by gifting us a bag of his gingerbread men—we haven't seen that since the old days."

"The were delicious," Vlad murmured, eyes heavy. "The circulatory systems were… inspired."

"We believe that a new mayor could herald a new age for Halloween Town, and that Dr. Finkelstein should be that mayor," Elizabeth continued earnestly. "Would you join us in calling for a change?"

"No," Jewel said and slammed the door.

What were the vampires thinking, interfering with the natural order of things? The Mayor was the Mayor of Halloween Town, that was his raison d'etre, his identity, his inherent construction; her other-half was a scientist, an inventor, a genius, that was _their_ inherent construction! Jack's newfangled ideas about elections were as silly as his ideas about Christmas, and they'd disappear just as quickly.

This is Jack's fault, Jack's and Sally's and the vampires'. It is absolutely not Jewel's fault that her other-half was elected Mayor of Halloween Town.


End file.
